Introducing the Rosary to a New Generation

I read recently that the Rosary fell out of favor among many Catholics after Vatican II. Thankfully, my family never got the memo. The Rosary has been part of my daily prayer life for as long as I can remember. As a child, I said one decade for each grade of school I was in, until I was ten and was old enough to say a full five decades a day. This is a tradition I am continuing with my own children.

As a teenager, my mother would wait up for me so that, even if it was midnight when I came home, we could say the Rosary together before we went to bed. The Rosary would become my daily companion, my strength when life got tough. The simple meditative prayers, and the grace that God provided through them, got me through so many challenges. At times in my life when I needed to make major decisions such as whom to marry or when life has been tinged with pain, I turned to the fifty-four day Rosary novena, a commitment to prayer which has never let me down. Over the years I have said the Rosary counting on my fingers in the middle of the night while feeding a baby and while buried under the covers on cold winter mornings. I think that I have even said it in the shower! These days, I say it first thing in the morning to get my day off to a good start.

October is the month of the Rosary with the feast of our Lady of the Rosary falling on October 7th. In the 4th grade Religious Education class I help to teach, we are introducing these young people to the Rosary. While three of the students had rosaries, none of them knew how to use one. I went out today to purchase little books for them that include how to say the Rosary, the text of the prayers, as well as beautiful illustrations of the scriptural mysteries to meditate on. We are going to have them make their own Rosaries and then have our Pastor come to class to bless them. I don't know if any of these children will develop a lifetime devotion to the Rosary as I have, but I hope that they will come to appreciate the beauty of the prayers and know that they can lean on them whenever they need to.